Terry:
Re: your post on full-time piano tuners and Wake County Public Schools’ PR efforts…It takes a large staff to convince people that Wake County has one of the best school systems in the galaxy. Sadly for Wake County Public Schools, the entire state of West Virginia was (literally) decades ahead of Wake in its “best in galaxy” planning.
Consider the following from the Inaugural address of Governor William B. Conley of West Virginia, March 4, 1929:
“I call on the citizenship everywhere to come to the aid of the officers they have chosen and help them make West Virginia the best in the galaxy of all the states in the Union.”
And Conley was no pushover to special interests, nor willing to pad the public budget, as his remarks and warnings on fiscal restraint demonstrate:
“There is a tendency in recent years for government to engage in certain lines of business in competition with its citizens. Such competition is unfair, tends to socialism, and means more and higher taxes.”
Unfortunately, what happens next in WV is that some morons at the federal level use the Great Depression as an excuse to unfairly engage in certain lines of business in competition with private citizens, initiate programs and policies that lead the country toward socialism, and justify the creation of more and higher taxes.
The Conley inaugural address is a fascinating read, and for the most part, well worth shamelessly copying by some (morally upright–?) future governor or politician.
And finally, while I’m not certain that having piano tuners-as-public-employees inexorably leads to civic perdition, the address offers this comment on tax reduction:
“Instead of studying new methods of spending more money, let us study new methods of spending less.”
Light-years ahead of our present policy approach. corrected
